Re: Space

For a second I thought it was gonna bail when it first started to take off.

Originally Posted by bmack86

And it's been long established that Chris hates fun.

Originally Posted by Hatinisbad

I took my niece this year and it was her first Coachella. It was so fun to see it through her eyes. She thought it felt like a magical scene from Shreck. The one where all the fairy tale creatures meet for the first time in Shreck's swamp.

Re: Space

Originally Posted by marooko

It takes five hours to fly from SFO to EWR. I just watched this thing leave our atmosphere in a matter of minutes.

The distance it traveled in those few minutes is nowhere close to the 3300 miles between SFO to EWR. At the average speed it was traveling it would have taken about an hour and a half to go from SFO to EWR. Still fast, but not as fast as you're thinking

Re: Space

Re: Space

Originally Posted by marooko

Really?!

I can't tell if you're actually surprised, or just fucking around, but yes really. I don't know where Falcon 9's orbit was set at, but, by way of comparison, Apollo 11's initial earth orbit was about 100 miles up.

Re: Space

Re: Space

For lack of a better term, I know the "thickness" of our atmosphere doesn't quite reach 3000 miles. Nor is it exactly 3k miles from east to west coast. It's close, and depending on where you drive you may drive further than 3000 miles, but it's not just 3k miles.

Re: Space

Nice avatar, John.

Originally Posted by bmack86

And it's been long established that Chris hates fun.

Originally Posted by Hatinisbad

I took my niece this year and it was her first Coachella. It was so fun to see it through her eyes. She thought it felt like a magical scene from Shreck. The one where all the fairy tale creatures meet for the first time in Shreck's swamp.

WASHINGTON (AP) — NASA is plotting a daring robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be some form of life.

The space agency set aside $15 million in its 2015 budget proposal to start planning some kind of mission to Europa. No details have been decided yet, but NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said Tuesday that it would be launched in the mid-2020s.

Robinson said the high radiation environment around Jupiter and distance from Earth would be a challenge. When NASA sent Galileo to Jupiter in 1989, it took the spacecraft six years to get to the fifth planet from the sun.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute astronomer Laurie Leshin said it could be "a daring mission to an extremely compelling object in our solar system."

Past NASA probes have flown by Europa, especially Galileo, but none have concentrated on the moon, one of dozens orbiting Jupiter. Astronomers have long lobbied for a mission to Europa, but proposals would have cost billions of dollars.

Last year, scientists discovered liquid plumes of water shooting up through Europa's ice. Flying through those watery jets could make Europa cheaper to explore than just circling it or landing on the ice, said NASA Europa scientist Robert Pappalardo.

NASA will look at many competing ideas for a Europa mission, so the agency doesn't know how big or how much it will cost, Robinson said. She said a major mission goal would be searching for life in the strange liquid water under the ice-covered surface.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said going to Europa would be more exciting than exploring dry Mars: "There might be fish under the ice."